This invention relates to retail fuel dispensers and more particularly, to a promotional system utilized in conjunction with a fuel dispenser that will allow promotional discounts and other marketing type offerings to be provided to a consumer based on the customer's purchasing habits.
For more than a decade, retail fuel dispensers have included magnetic strip card readers for reading magnetic strip debit/credit cards. The magnetic strip cards are typically small plastic cards that contain a strip of magnetic material (i.e., magnetic data) that includes information such as an account number and a credit or debit facility (e.g., a bank).
However, many retailers, such as those used by various wholesale food clubs or video stores, have an established customer base that uses bar coded cards. Bar coded cards are also typically small plastic cards, but instead of having a magnetic strip, they contain bar codes (i.e. optical data) that identify a certain account with the retailer. These bar coded cards allow the retailers to provide many benefits, such as providing customers with frequent shopper awards, preventing unauthorized use, providing certain purchase discounts, and identifying an internal payment account.
A problem arises when these retailers, with an established customer base with bar coded cards, wish to sell fuel using conventional fuel dispensers. Because conventional fuel dispensers cannot read bar coded cards, one solution is for the retailers to provide their customers with magnetic strip cards for purchasing fuel in addition to the bar coded card already in use. However, such a solution is not only expensive, it is undesirable for many customers to keep two cards for a single retailer.
Another solution is to require the customers to switch from the bar coded card to the magnetic strip card. This solution is impractical because so many bar coded cards are already in use and it would be very expensive to convert them. Also, many facilities of the retailers already include bar code readers that would require replacement.
Further, there is a growing trend for retailers to offer fuel dispensing facilities. For example, the popularity of "hyper-market" type retail stores or non-traditional retail petroleum marketers has increased dramatically over the past few years Wal-Mart is a typical retailer that uses the hyper-market concept for providing a wide variety of goods and services at a single location. These goods and services have been expanded to now include on site fuel dispensing.
Conventional systems have been developed to identify and reward certain customer purchases by determining from predefined criteria when a customer has purchased certain items from a designated group and rewarding the customer based thereon. Further, rewards may be given based on customer loyalty, i.e. the number of purchases made at a particular store or the quantity of items purchased. One such type of conventional system is commercially available from Catalina Marketing International, Inc. of St. Petersburg, Fla.
However, conventional customer rewards systems have not been expanded to include fuel dispensing systems. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that hyper-market operators have little control over the fuel dispensing apparatus installed at their facilities. More particularly, the fuel dispensing apparatus providers, such as the Wayne Division of Dresser Industries, Gilbarco and Tokheim control the interface into the pumping system and thus do not provide an externally available interface that will allow the fuel price to be dynamically adjusted in accordance with customer purchases.
Therefore, it can be seen that a system and method that integrates a customer purchase reward system with a fuel dispensing apparatus would be highly desirable. In this manner, the retailer can reward and encourage customer loyalty, and the fuel provider may attract new customers that would not normally purchase their fuel without the incentive of a discounted price.